


Rara Avis

by MrProphet



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 15:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10699614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	Rara Avis

I hate working small town cases. 

People are lousy at keeping secrets, and the more of them there are, the worse they get. One man – or woman – can usually hold something pretty close, but tell someone else and you more than double the odds of someone spilling. By the time ten people know, you can pretty much guarantee someone’s going to squeal sooner rather than later. And yet, take a whole town and give them a secret and they’ll hold it like a baby holds its bottle.

Small towners say the city is cruel, but really she’s just cold; cruelty needs the sort of personal attention that you only get with the close-knit communities that small towns breed. The city will give you the cold shoulder every time, but a small town will kick you in the knee then put you down for walking out of step.

Potter’s Neck was a typical small town. Close knit, quaint, hostile to outsiders and downright brutal towards any of its own who broke ranks. I was here because of the latter.

John Marsh was a young man who had come out to New York to make his fortune, met a girl and planned to settle down. Things had been going well for him; his career was taking off, he had a nice gal and a bright future. Then one night he’d received a visit from three men in country clothes; the next day he threw himself under a train.

I’d been hired by his fiancée – which was a bad start – to find out what had happened to make him take his own life. That his late-night visitors had come from Potter’s Neck was a fair bet, but a little digging and a favour at the DMV had confirmed that the car parked outside belonged to James Marsh, the dead man’s brother. 

So that brought me to Potter’s Neck, where I was about as welcome as bacon at a bar mitzvah. James Marsh was out and his wife – a homely thing with a flat face and gawping expression which seemed to be characteristic of the townsfolk – wouldn’t let me past the door. I took a stroll past John Marsh’s old place, trying to ignore the small crowd forming up to follow me around, and couldn’t help but notice that some community-spirited soul had nailed a dead crow over the door.

There was a café in town, so I stopped to get a drink. I’d have left the whole lot behind and told the girl to write it off as a bad job, but I guess I liked the dame; my mistake.

The waitress had the same flat features and gawping mouth as Mrs Marsh, but she was younger and livelier and wore it better. She was also willing to talk a little, despite the glowers of her neighbours. Her name was Alice.

“Sure, I knew John,” she said. “Nice guy; not like his brother.”

“James Marsh isn’t so nice?”

“He’s a hardass,” she replied. “Traditional. He was keen to see John settle into the old ways; bought him his own place to try and persuade him to fit in. When John took off, Mr Marsh was mad as hell.”

“Why wait so long to go after him?”

“Took time to find him, I heard. He had guys out looking for months. Then Saul Cooper came back and Mr Marsh and Jack Grove were off like a shot.”

“And Grove is…?”

“Missy Grove’s brother.” I must’ve looked blank. “John’s betrothed?”

Well, that was news to me; I wondered if it was news to the girl back in town. “Did they know he’d hooked up with someone else in New York?”

“Reckon they found out up there. Came back and Jack put the black bird over his threshold.” Alice shrugged. “Mr Marsh let him, so… he’s dead to the town now.”

“He’s dead to everyone, sweetheart,” I assured her. “John Marsh was killed three weeks ago.”

She looked sad, but not surprised. “Like I said; Jack put the black bird over the threshold.”

It was getting late, and on an impulse I called the office and told the Old Man I was staying the night in Potter’s Neck.

“You onto something there?” he asked.

I told him I didn’t figure, but I was too tired to be driving back in the dark. I got a room at the only hotel in town and ordered room service, but my gut was churning over something. I barely ate a thing, drank too much bourbon from the bottle I keep in the car and went to sleep wondering if I guy could be cursed to death if he believed in it.

 

I woke to a sound of someone creeping into my room. Two someones, talking about taking me out to the swamp. My head was fuzzy from the bourbon and something else, but I recognised the voice of the bellhop telling someone that he’d put enough dope in my food to drop a horse. I heard a clink of handcuffs and felt someone bending over me, so I got a hand on the gun under my pillow, sat up fast and let them both know how little I’d actually managed to eat.

I cracked one guy round the head with the butt of my .38, then the room got to spinning a little too fast for me so I leaned on the wall and chatted to the bellhop while I waited for it to stop.

“You make a habit of drugging guests?” I asked him.

“You make a habit of clobbering cops?” Apparently, I’d not be getting any help from the law.

I switched on the light and regretted it at once. In the moment before the headache blinded me, I noticed the kid was carrying a dead crow; then he hit me with it. We wrestled; I dropped the gun and he dropped the crow, which seemed even to my drug-addled brain, but in retrospect inconvenienced me far more than it inconvenienced him.

The kid was small, but he was strong. He tossed me across the room like a rag doll and I tripped on the unconscious sheriff. There was a gun on his hip and I grabbed or it. The bellhop crashed into me and the pistol went off between us with a roar.

I lay there for who-knows-how-long, dazed by the noise and the drugs and not sure if the blood soaking my shirt was mine or his. When he didn’t climb off of me I figured it was probably his, shoved him onto the floor and sat up. 

There was a lot of noise downstairs. I retrieved my own pistol, made sure the sheriff was secured and made my way downstairs.

Turned out the noise was the cavalry. The Old Man had called half the agency off their cases after Miss Struthers did a file check which turned up more than a dozen cops and PIs who’d gone missing after poking their noses into Potter’s Neck business.

I figured the town would be turning nasty, but as the cold night air cleared my head, I realised the whole place was kind of quiet. That made me worry; so did the dead crow nailed over the door of the café.

I remembered what the sheriff had said about the swamp and fortunately, turns out a town full of people can’t make their way through a swamp without leaving a trail. We went after them and soon we could hear music – if I can call it that – drifting through the reeds.

The villagers were gathered on an island and what we saw there… If I told you all I saw there, you’d never believe me. They were singing, or chanting, and dancing in a weird, wild, jerky way around a pair of wicker frames. One of them hung open; the other was closed and it rocked as the person trapped inside struggled against her bonds.

There were five squat stones around the circle, crudely carved into the shape of glowering crows. One of the villagers was dressed in a cloak of feathers and wore a stone-beaked crow’s mask. The others wore next to nothing; here and there one of them thrashed in an ecstatic fit.

And then there was the statue. It was… I can describe it as a large bird and say it was carved from black stone, but there was more to it than that. Something in the shape was wrong; something about the stone… 

It was a bird in that it had wings and feathers, but really only in as much as a car is an elephant because it has a trunk. I call it stone because that’s what you carve statues out of, but there was something in the way it glistened in the firelight that seemed almost alive.

And the shadow it cast…

Someone shot the crow-priest as we went in and the villagers panicked. I cut Alice loose from the frame, trying to ignore the statue looming over us. Slowly, the villagers were figuring out that there were only nine of us, so we beat a retreat as soon as we could.

We came back the next day with State troopers and the rest of the agency to boot. The town was empty. When we found the island the stones and the statue were gone, although the sense of threat remained.

And everywhere were crows, sitting, watching.

I hate working small town cases.


End file.
